Shorts, 5/29.

"Paul Newman, aged 82, has announced his retirement from acting," notes Ronald Bergan at the Guardian's film blog. "Unlike politicians or businessmen, there are few precedents of actors announcing their retirement, the most famous being Greta Garbo at 36. However, like many Hollywood actors, Newman did his best work in the early part of his career, even if it is hard to imagine American cinema without him."

In the Boston Review, Alan A Stone revisits Do the Right Thing: "Has American culture shifted enough in the intervening years so that white audiences can see the film a different way?"

"Terry Teachout ponders an interesting question: is there a great Hollywood film score written for a comedy rather than a drama or a thriller?" This gets Alex Ross going. "It's hard to think of one, though I am tempted to put Danny Elfman's Beetlejuice in the near-great category. Does Charade, with the fabulous Henry Mancini music, count as a comedy?" Click on for more rankings of soundtracks, though mostly for non-comedies.

Via Movie City News, a London Times package on Tintin: Jeff Dawson's deep backgrounder on Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson's plans, Michael Morpurgo remembers getting hooked on the comics at age 12 and a Ben Macintyre column from December: "George Remi, alias Hergé, was one of the greatest and least-hailed artists of the 20th century, able to convey meaning through image with an economy of style that was entirely his own. A new exhibition at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris celebrating Hergé's work proves what most genuine Tintinophiles have always known: the genius is in the pictures." The exhibition's closed, but the read's still relevant.

"Black Gold is galvanising audiences wherever it plays," writes David Smith in a longish piece for the Observer that delves into the question of whether or not there is such a thing as genuinely fair trade. Related: Use the Coffee Calculator at the film's site to find out where those couple of bucks for each cuppa are actually going.

"As the latest 'bleak' Australian film to be critically lauded, Noise has a lot of qualities," writes David Marin-Guzman. "The problem of the film is that its bleakness can't distance itself from its banality."

"Sundance homilies and truisms are encased in a meta frame in I'm Reed Fish, screenwriter Reed Fish's semi-autobiographical tale about seizing the day, chasing dreams, and learning to chart one's own life path," writes Nick Schager. Also at Slant, Ed Gonzalez: "Gracie's only achievement is technical, yet it has nothing to do with creative merit: Prints for the film, Davis Guggenheim's first feature-length fiction, will be carbon neutral." Related: For the Los Angeles Times, Gina Piccalo talks with Elisabeth Shue.

"Victims and despair were what Jonathan Demme expected to find when he headed to New Orleans with his camera. Instead, he said, he discovered tough-minded heroes, who became the stars of his unadorned film Right to Return: New Home Movies from the Lower Ninth Ward," writes Felicia R Lee. "Tavis Smiley will turn over the entire week of his PBS program, The Tavis Smiley Show, to broadcast parts of the film." And the complete work will screen at Silverdocs.

Also in the New York Times:

• John Anderson checks in on Jennifer Lynch as she shoots Surveillance: "As the daughter of the director David Lynch, she has an inherited ease around film shoots; as the director of Boxing Helena, she has something to prove."

• Despite critical acclaim, the Broadway revival of Journey's End will be coming to an early close and Clint Eastwood's Flags of Our Fathers and Letters to Iwo Jima were hardly box office hits. Charles Isherswood floats a "potential conclusion": "Americans can perhaps be forgiven for failing to warm to entertainment that underscores what journalism is making brutally plain every day: War is a cruel and destructive enterprise that maims or destroys the lives of people on all sides, even when fought for a noble cause."

• John Marchese: "If all goes as planned, Scranton would not only be home base to [Paul] Sorvino's own Miranda Films but also offer other filmmakers a full-service production house with soundstages, editing and looping rooms and a recording studio. All with costs a fraction of those in Los Angeles or New York."

• "Mindful of [the Passion of the Christ] market, Universal Pictures has teamed up with Grace Hill Media, a public relations firm that reaches out to religious groups, to publicize the mainstream film Evan Almighty." Sara Ivry reports.

• Virginia Heffernan offers "not a list of the top videos on YouTube. That would be too simple, too old-Web. Instead, here are five of the most fascinating worlds to get lost in on YouTube. Every single one of them is worth a detour."

• Patrick McGeehan: "Charles Nelson Reilly, who acted and directed on Broadway but came to be best known for his campy television appearances on talk shows and Match Game, died on Friday in Los Angeles. He was 76 and lived in Beverly Hills, Calif."

New Perspectives Quarterly talks with Alejandro González Iñárritu, a sort of companion piece to Nathan Gardels and Mike Medavoy's essay on Hollywood's role in an era of globalization, "Shock and Awe vs Hearts and Minds at the Movies."

"Today's mass-audience films, from all over the world, adhere to the principles and particulars of continuity editing," writes David Bordwell. "Not many artistic styles, in any medium, have had such a long run." And yet there have been incremental changes over the decades; he explains "intensified continuity."

"It's this vivid 'cinema in your head,' forever on stand-by and ready to roll at the flick of one's thought, that I crave." Girish explains.

"Despite its symbolic richness, at first sight chess seems to have little cinematic potential." Ah, but on second glance... Matthew J Reisz in the Independent.

"It's a Purple Rose of Cairo moment. The character has escaped from the silver screen and is somehow here in the flesh, in real life. It's precisely why Once seems so genuine, because in many respects, it is real." Gregg LaGambina talks with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova for the Los Angeles Times, where Sheigh Crabtree outlines just how very successful this little movie has been so far.

New reviews from Tom Mes @ Midnight Eye:

• "Director Toshio Masuda came from among the B-ranks, but after being assigned to direct his first film with the [Nikkatsu] studio's top star, Yujiro Ishihara, he scored a string of hits that gave him the trust of his bosses. Monument to the Girls' Corps gives an indication of the reach of that trust."

• Koichi Saito's The Homeless "is a picaresque tale in the truest sense of the word" and "a watershed of sorts for [Meiko Kaji], who made a clear decision to turn a page: she began to pick her projects with more care, choosing quality over quantity."

• "Tree Without Leaves makes a good candidate for the ultimate maza-kon movie. Here it is the mother who tries to hold the family together when the tides of fortune turn and the father is incapable, even unwilling, of fending off the financial downfall."

At Twitch, James Maruyama reviews I Am Nipponjin, " a thoroughly enjoyable film that is unique in that it views Japan society through the eyes of an American foreign exchange student who goes there to learn more about the country but instead teaches the Japanese a little something about themselves and what it means to be 'nipponjin' (Japanese)."

"The serious Science Fiction film genre is dead," argues Bill Gibron at PopMatters. "Well, okay, perhaps not actually deceased, but its definitely on cinematic life support."

New Yorker editor David Remnick sees off the Sopranos.

He wrote the novel, then the screenplay, and now he's shooting the film - his first. For the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, visits the set of Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island (in German).

German art scene update: Jörg Immendorf has died, but Neo Rauch is alive and doing very, very well.

Online listening tip. Blake at Cinema Strikes Back: "Lost in the shuffle of it all I realized I had recorded the Q&A for one of the Linda Linda Linda screenings at the recent AFI Dallas."

Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee's video essay on Euzhan Palcy's Sugar Cane Alley.

Posted by dwhudson at May 29, 2007 5:54 AM